Yesterday the Grant Mazak Band, for which I play bass, played our usual first Sunday of the month gig at Cheatham Street Warehouse. It was a fun show for a couple of reasons: we had one of Grant’s faculty friends sit in on saxophone, and my good friend David was recording the performance for us.

David graduated from Texas State University a couple of years back with a degree in Sound and Recording Technology, and he really knows his stuff. He brought out his Powerbook-based ProTools rig and recorded 15 tracks of digital audio goodness. We listened to the raw tracks briefly after the gig and were delighted with the results. With some mixing and equalization work, I think we’ll have some very workable recordings of the band.

If you live in Central Texas and need some audio engineering work, I highly recommend Dave.

Toward the end of last year, I finally got completely fed up with Quicken. It had a number of bugs that Intuit never thought important enough to fix, and we lost data from Quicken more than once. (In all fairness, the data loss wasn’t entirely Intuit’s fault, but once it was done, it became much easier to entertain alternatives.)

After reading about a number of packages, and trying a few out, I settled on Moneydance, a Java-based package that’s available for a number of platforms, Mac OS X among them. Because of its Java roots, its UI doesn’t always look quite as polished as some, and certain operations are a bit slow. In spite of that, however, I’ve been delighted with it. Contributing factors to my satisfaction:

1. For my inner geek, it has a Python plugin that allows you to access all your financial data from your own scripts. Want to have your bank balance text messaged to your cell phone daily so you can keep close tabs on how much you have remaining to spend? It’s pretty easy to write such a module with the scripting support.
2. A platform neutral file format means you can work on your finances on any of the supported platforms, and that using UNIX copy commands won’t corrupt your data. (Yes, this was how I lost our Quicken data one time — using cp left behind the resource forks, and made the files unusable.)
3. It’s only $29.95.
4. Best of all, they have answered every email I’ve ever sent completely, promptly, and courteously. This level of support is unheard of from most large software vendors, and I love it. It’s great to be able to say “Hey, I encountered this bug” and get back a “Sorry about that, we’ve fixed it now, go grab the latest preview build” message, often within 12 hours.

I’ve no affiliation with the Moneydance folks, I’m just a very happy customer. If you’re looking for a good financial management package, I highly recommend it.

Back toward the end of 2002, our friends Steve & Renee Johnson and their kids moved away from San Marcos. We were pretty sad about it, since they had been instrumental in getting us down here to begin with, and our families have always enjoyed each other immensely.

Now, after various trials, travels, and travails, they’re returning to the city of Saint Mark. Even better, they’ll be within walking distance, so when I get the urge to blow on the pennywhistle, I can take a short stroll and have someone to play with. They’re overjoyed to be back in a city with a number of people they’ve known and loved for a long time, and we’re thrilled they’re returning.

Welcome back, Johnsons!